How Does Action Value (AV) Determine Victory? The Speed Revolution Rewriting Turn-Based Rules

Have you ever found yourself stuck in this frustrating situation: In Memory of Chaos, your fully built main DPS hits like a truck, but the boss always gets to act first, locking your support down or one-shotting them before you can react. You stare at the turn order in disbelief as the enemy acts twice before your entire team gets a single full rotation. You stacked every possible damage stat, but you still feel trapped by the flow of the battle.

You’ve been focusing all your attention on your character’s damage output, but you’ve completely missed the true core of Honkai: Star Rail’s combat system: speed.

Now compare that to another Trailblazer fighting the exact same boss. Their team’s total damage on paper is actually lower, but they’ve carefully tuned their team’s speed, so every support moves just 1 point faster than their main DPS, creating a perfect cycle of buffs into damage. They use pull bar skills to let their main DPS act twice in a single cycle, taking the boss down before it can even charge its ultimate attack. They win effortlessly, like they’re controlling time itself.

That gap in performance comes down to understanding speed. In Honkai: Star Rail, speed isn’t an optional secondary stat—it’s the core that determines how many turns you get and how efficient your team is. This first entry in our Core Combat Mastery series will break down the secrets of speed, explaining how speed tuning, pull bars, and action value (AV) come together to create this strategy revolution that upends traditional turn-based combat rules.

Why Traditional Turn-Based Thinking Can’t Explain Action Value (AV)

In traditional turn-based games, speed only determines who goes first. But in Honkai: Star Rail, speed determines how many times you can act in a fixed window of battle time. This is a fundamental shift. If you stick to old habits and only focus on stacking attack damage, you’ll hit a brick wall with speed, and this is the biggest blind spot that separates new players from experienced endgame pros.

The Overlooked Stat: The Hidden Value of Speed

When new players build their relics, they automatically chase crit rate, crit damage, and attack percent, and usually write off speed substats as useless. This is a deadly mistake. Speed directly determines your action value (AV), which in turn determines how many total actions you get in turn-limited challenges like Memory of Chaos or Pure Fiction.

Example: Let’s say the first cycle (Cycle 0) of Memory of Chaos has a total action value pool of 150. A character with 100 speed needs 100 AV (calculated as 10000 / 100) to take one action. A character with 134 speed only needs 74.6 AV (10000 / 134) per action. Within the 150 total AV of the first cycle, the 100 speed character only gets 1 action, while the 134 speed character gets 2 full actions (74.6 + 74.6 = 149.2). That means just by hitting the right speed threshold, the second character gets an entire extra turn of damage, healing, or energy gain for free. That’s the hidden power of speed.

The Common Speed Paradox: Why Is My Support Always Acting After My DPS?

This is a classic speed tuning disaster. You farmed perfect relics for Bronya to support your Jingliu, but in actual combat, Jingliu acts first, then Bronya. When Bronya uses her skill to pull Jingliu’s action forward, Jingliu gets to act immediately—but half of the buff duration is already wasted. Even worse, if your Tingyun is slower than your main DPS, your DPS won’t get her attack buff or energy regen on the very first turn.

Example: Player Xiao Ming built out both his Jingliu (base speed 96) and Bronya (base speed 99) with top tier gear, but never intentionally adjusted their speed. Once he got into combat, Bronya ended up at 120 speed, while Jingliu was at 115 speed, so Bronya always acts after Jingliu. This means Bronya’s skill can’t pull Jingliu forward right after she acts, creating an awkward rotation of: Jingliu acts → Bronya acts → Enemies act → Jingliu acts. This wastes a ton of skill points (SP) and gives you terrible buff uptime. That’s the price you pay for not understanding speed tuning.

How Speed Rewrites the Rules: The Role of Pull Bars and Action Value (AV)

Once you understand the blind spots of old turn-based thinking, we can break down the rules of this new system. The core of this system shifts combat from fixed turn order to timeline management. Under these new rules, pull bar skills and the action value (AV) formula are the tools you use to control the battle timeline.

Core Formula Breakdown: What Is Action Value?

Action Value (shortened to AV) is the most critical concept you need to understand. It represents how much “time” needs to pass before your character takes their next action. The lower your AV, the higher your character sits on the turn order bar in the top left of the screen.

Base Action Value = 10000 / Speed

A 100 speed character has a base AV of 100. A 200 speed character has a base AV of 50. That means over the same period of battle time, the 200 speed character gets two actions for every one action the 100 speed character gets. All of your speed tuning strategies are built around this simple formula.

The Art of Pull Bars: Actively Manipulating Turn Order

Pull bar skills work by directly reducing your own character’s current action value. This is an extremely powerful ability that lets you forcefully rearrange the battle timeline. Different pull bar skills work in different ways:

• Absolute Pull (Example: Bronya’s Skill): This effect gives the target “immediate action”, which is equivalent to instantly setting the target’s current AV to zero, letting them cut straight to the top of the action bar.
• Percentage Pull (Example: Sparkle’s Skill): This effect moves a single ally’s action forward by 50%. This means it cuts 50% of the target’s total base AV (note: this is not a 50% cut of remaining current AV, it’s calculated based on base AV, making this effect even more powerful).
• Full Team Pull (Example: Robin’s Ultimate): This effect lets your entire team act immediately. This is the highest tier tactical tool, capable of instantly resetting your entire team’s offensive rhythm.

The Tactics of Push Bars: The Crowd Control Value of Nihility Characters

The opposite of pulling your own team’s bar is pushing the enemy’s bar. These skills increase the enemy’s current action value, delaying their turn. This is the core value of Nihility path characters (like Welt) and breaking Imaginary/Quantum toughness.

When you trap an enemy with Imprisonment (from Imaginary toughness break) or Entanglement (from Quantum toughness break), you don’t just deal extra damage—you delay the enemy’s next turn. This creates more safe space for your team to deal damage, and it’s a critical crowd control tool for high difficulty content like 0-cycle clears.

Beyond Attack: 3 New Speed Tuning Metrics to Build Your Team

Now that we know how important speed is, how do you actually tune your team’s speed? This isn’t just a matter of stacking as much speed as possible—you need precise metrics to guide your build. Your goal is to move beyond just looking at attack, and start using these 3 metrics to build your team correctly.

Core Metric: Speed Thresholds for Memory of Chaos

Memory of Chaos (the game’s endgame abyss) is the ultimate test of your team’s power, and it is split into cycles. Cycle 0 has a total action value of 150, and starting from Cycle 1, every additional cycle has 100 total action value. To get as much damage as possible within the turn limit, you need to hit specific speed thresholds to pull off extra actions like double acting in the first cycle, or three actions every two cycles.

• 134 Speed (Recommended Minimum Threshold): This gives a base AV of 74.6, which lets you take two actions in the first 150 AV of Cycle 0 (74.6 * 2 = 149.2 AV). This is the first tier threshold every main DPS and support should aim for.
• 161 Speed (High Difficulty Threshold): This gives a base AV of 62.1. After getting two actions in the first 150 AV cycle, you can fit three more actions in the next two 100 AV cycles (total 200 AV, 62.1 * 3 = 186.3 AV), giving you a total of 5 actions across Cycles 0, 1, and 2.
• 143 Speed (Specific Team Threshold): This gives a base AV of 69.9, which lets you fit three actions across Cycle 0 and Cycle 1 (total 250 AV, 69.9 * 3 = 209.7 AV). This is a common threshold for teams that want three actions across two cycles.

When building your relics, you should prioritize hitting these speed thresholds first, and only go for max crit stats after you meet the threshold.

Support Metric: High Speed Supports vs Low Speed Supports

Speed tuning for supports is the key to keeping your team running smoothly, and it all depends on what your support’s role is:

High Speed Supports (Skill Point Generator / Debuff): Supports like Tingyun, Pela, and Asta that need to auto attack often to generate skill points or keep debuffs active on enemies should stack as much speed as possible (ideally 161+). The more actions they take, the more skill points your team has, and the more consistent enemy debuffs stay up.

Low Speed Supports (Pull Bar / Specific Buffs): This specifically refers to Bronya. To get the perfect rotation of “Main DPS acts → Bronya pulls → Main DPS acts again”, Bronya needs to be exactly 1-2 speed slower than your main DPS. This build is called “Slow Tail Bronya”, and it’s the top tier speed tuning strategy to maximize skill point efficiency and buff uptime.

Common Speed Tuning Model Examples

Speed tuning is a full system build. We’ve broken down the most common team speed tuning models below:

• Generic Fast Main DPS Team
  • Core Characters: Jingliu / Dan Heng • Imbibitor Lunae
  • Main DPS Speed Target: 134 speed (threshold hit)
  • Support A (Tingyun) Speed Target: 161+ speed (skill point generation)
  • Support B (Healer/Sustain) Speed Target: 134+ speed (get buff/energy online early)
• Slow Tail Bronya Team
  • Core Characters: Jingliu / Blade
  • Main DPS Speed Target: 135 speed (with speed boots)
  • Support A (Bronya) Speed Target: 134 speed (exactly 1 point slower than main DPS)
  • Support B (Pela) Speed Target: 161+ speed (skill point generation / defense reduction)
• DoT Damage Team (Kafka)
  • Core Character: Kafka
  • Main DPS (Kafka) Speed Target: 161+ speed (core requirement)
  • Support A (Black Swan) Speed Target: 160 speed (exactly 1 point slower than Kafka)
  • Support B (Ruan Mei) Speed Target: 160+ speed (maintain buff uptime)
• Fast Sparkle Slow DPS Team
  • Core Characters: Seele / Qingque
  • Main DPS Speed Target: 0 extra speed (with attack boots)
  • Support A (Sparkle) Speed Target: 161+ speed (fast pull bar support)
  • Support B (Fu Xuan) Speed Target: 134+ speed (maintain shield uptime)

The Future of Speed: A Choice Between Time and Efficiency

On the battlefields of Honkai: Star Rail, speed gives you control over time itself. How well you understand speed determines whether you’re passively reacting to enemy attacks, or actively planning out the entire battle’s future.

This ultimately comes down to a choice about your approach to combat: Are you satisfied just dealing damage, outputting passively within the given time frame? Or do you want to be the master of time, using precise speed tuning, pull bar manipulation, and action value calculations to chase maximum combat efficiency, making the entire battle flow to your rhythm?

Mastering the secrets of speed is the first step to go from a regular Trailblazer to a tactical master. Your turn will no longer just be a single turn—it will be all the time you get to control.